7 quick takes..
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| Birthdays of a four year old are PINK! |
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| Sophie found a baby chick without a mom and wanted to keep it. |
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| Party ganes |
- Good morning! I had written a big part of my blog but I probably did something wrong and now it's all gone so I can start again. It's Monday, it's raining, Hartmut went to Lilongwe, Doris and Sophie are tired and irritable after an intense weekend and I fear that today is going to be 'fun'. Well, that's a small price to pay for a truly fun weekend. The comfort is that I found leek in the shop (we don't find that often) and a big pot of vegetable soup is simmering on the stove for tonight. If all goes south, I will just look forward to supper.
- The weekend started with a thanksgiving dinner in Lilongwe. New friends (the pastor's couple of the church-plant we have started going to) invited us to their thanksgiving party and it was great. There were kids to play with for the girls, there was nice food and there were lovely people. I was thinking about why it felt so comfortable to be with all these people, even though we had never met most of them. I think that I have found the answer in a book that I am reading. It's called 'Third Culture Kids' and it describes families like ours who don't live in their home country/culture. Because of it they no longer fully identify with that culture but they are also not really living like the people from the culture/country they live in now. I am not 100% Dutch anymore, and as a family, we are even less Dutch, but we are also not a Malawian family so we live in what the book describes as the 'Third culture'. A place of neither one nor the other. Some days it's a great place to be, but other days it is lonely and confusing. All the families that were present at the dinner represented, just like us, many different countries and cultures. Although we may not have shared nationalities, we shared that space in the 'third culture'. It's a place that is hard to understand if you haven't been there and that is probably the reason why it feels heartwarming and familiar to spend time with people who know that space as well as we do.
- The dinner was in Lilongwe and because Salima (where Hartmut works) is sort of halfway between Lilongwe and here, we did what we often do; the girls and I took a 'shared taxi' from home to Salima and Hartmut would fetch us there to go to Lilongwe. Usually it goes fairly smooth. You always have to wait until the taxi fills up, but that takes never too long, it's usually a little cramped but because I have two kids on my lap, people give me some space and some grace and it's most of the time quite fine. We were about halfway when the car suddenly slowed down and then stopped. Looking at the petrol gauge confirmed what I already feared; out of petrol! A bicycle taxi was stopped and the driver sped of to the closest petrol station to fill a coke bottle with fuel. 15 minutes later we were on our way again and nobody complained because these things happen. After everybody had left the taxi at the taxi rank I asked the driver if he wanted to bring us to Hartmut's work, a few kilometers out of town. He was keen so I offered him some money for petrol in advance. This is common practice. Malawian drivers don't have the kind of cash flow that allows them to fill up their tank. As a result they only put in as much fuel as they need for a trip. But my driver told me that this would not be necessary. We drove away and everything went well for a few kilometers until the car stopped again. The petrol gauge was lower than any point I though imaginable. (Dear people, don't panic if your gauge goes to 'empty', it can go much lower than that!') A bicycle taxi was ordered again and the story repeated itself. Never a dull day...
- Another event that made the weekend so exciting but also exhausting was the celebration of our little miss Doris. She is turning four tomorrow but we celebrated her yesterday. My laptop battery is almost flat so I copied this take from Instagram.. I keep telling myself that she isn't actually four yet, because that will happen on Tuesday. But to her she is the four-est girl who has ever been four because today she got celebrated and how! It started with gifts in the morning. I can't tell who was more excited; Doris because she was getting gifts or Sophie because she could finally give that big box of gifts that she had been working on for weeks (swipe to see). That was the only part of the birthday that went as planned, as the rest of the day involved lots of alternative plans and laughs because things here never go the way you hope. The decorations on the cake that were so carefully designed by the girls collapsed after three minutes (note to self: chocolate and heat don't go well together.) For the afternoon we had invited some girls from the neighborhood and Doris wanted to decorate cupcakes but when we woke up we had no electricity. It stayed away all day so I could not bake cupcakes and the party guests had to decorate biscuits instead. And then the party itself... The girls had decided that we should invite three girls because three + Sophie would mean that there would be four guests for the four year old. A very sensible conclusion, I thought. But this is Malawi and we ended up with three more little girls. A long tim ago we learned that a party is no party without a meal and meat so rice, drumsticks and a tomato relish were made and the food was divided into slightly smaller portions to feed the extra mouths. We had planned a craft and thanks to the printer we could give all the girls their own flower crowns. In the end fun was had by all. Doris smiled all day and before she went to bed I got a big hug and a 'thank you' so I think we did fine...
- It's rather painful when someone calls your most prized possession a 'rag', but that's what happened to Sophie. Before she was born, my mother made a beautiful baby blanket and as soon as she came after she was born Sophie was wrapped in it. It was beautiful and soft and we loved it. Sophie loved it too, so much that it became the one thing she needed to fall asleep and the item she drags around wherever we go. This has caused some 'wear and tear' and every time we see my mom, she fixes it. But lately it has been beyond repair. The blanket that was once soft is now a knotted bundle of loose ends and strings and I am afraid to try to undo that big know as I am fairly certain that the blanket will fall apart. A few weeks ago we stayed overnight in Lilongwe at a lodge and Sophie accidentally left it behind. In the evening, when she went to bed she was looking for her 'bedje' and that's when we realised that we left it behind. We contacted the lodge right away and heard 'Oh sorry, we threw it away because we thought it was a rag.' Fortunately they were able to retrieve it and this weekend Sophie was reunited with her favourite blanket.
- We finally got our pigs! They were big enough to make the overnight ferry journey from Likoma Island and when they came we all fell in love immediately. I never thought I would say this but they are so cute! We love watching them and an added benefit is that I have a great place to bring all the peels and scraps from the kitchen.
- We don't have power and my laptop battery is almost flat so I will quickly finish the blog. The girls and I will go outside because the rain has stopped. Probably not for long though; rain season has started and every day we are treated to showers that turn roads into rivers and fields into lakes. Everybody has started to plant their crops and people walk around with big smiles. Almost every Malawian has known hunger but rain holds the promise of growth and food and is a great reason to be grateful. Have a great week!
